I was thinking about switching this blog’s engine for some time now, mainly because I was stuck with Community Server 2007 (.NET 1.1!), not playing along with any further upgrades. Too much custom actions and customization, I guess. Meanwhile, Community Server went mainstream and developed into a really big and complete community solution (blogs, forums, wikis, galleries, …), while I only needed a simple blog engine.

I became more alert about the BlogEngine.NET after our local MS DPE’s set up their blogging site. Loving its simplicity and responsiveness, the idea of migrating to a new engine was becoming stronger by the day, until I gave in and gave it a try. Note: the root of all evil lied in the fact that my blog is hosted on my hosting provider servers with limited access and other options.

The setup couldn’t be easier – copy the files. The tricky part was migrating the data. Hopefully, others have been on the same path before me (here and here), so I just had to adapt those sql scripts a little and get rid of all the spam, which found its way into my database through all these years. The new database is currently 20x smaller than the old one, which sure sounds good too.

I’m not completely saying goodbye to Community Server though. SLODUG, SLOWUG and Spletomanija communities will continue to run on Community Server, which fits perfectly for the job.